


a garden in the sea

by tiend



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Force-Sensitive Shmi Skywalker, Gardens & Gardening, Kamino, Shmi Skywalker Lives, Slavery, Tatooine (Star Wars), Tatooine Slave Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-01 04:46:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16758214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiend/pseuds/tiend
Summary: Mos Espa still buzzed with the news. Jango was less interested learning that a human child had won the Boonta Eve Classic than he was in the rumour that the persons who'd taken the child away afterwards were jetiise. In a ship that hinted the Trade Federation blockade over Naboo was breakable.The child's mother was a local, a slave mechanic. He'd take a look at her after the trip to Gardulla's, see what she knew, and then leave this sandy hell-hole of a planet.





	a garden in the sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



If Mos Espa still buzzed with the news ten days later, then Gardulla Besadii’s court was frantic. Not only had the Hutt bet against the human child that had won the Boonta Eve Classic, but she’d just discovered she’d once owned him - owned him, and lost him and his mother in another bad gamble. The lady was a sore loser; Jango nudged some of the broken glass with the toe of his boot. Freshly thrown. The ice hadn’t even melted.

Gardulla’s tantrums held little interest for Jango. The various scraps of information he’d overheard, kicking his heels in the Hutt's anteroom? Now those, those bore investigating. Jango tucked the credits inside his armour and took himself off to Mos Espa.

Cantina opinion there had settled on the idea that the strangers had been jetiise, come to take the boy away to the Temple on Coruscant. On its face, that was ridiculous; the boy was ten, far too old to be trained, but he was gone, and they certainly didn't sound like normal slavers. Too much effort, badly applied. The descriptions of their ship, a sleek silver shape, suggested the cordon around Naboo wasn’t as tight as had been reported. Useful to know.

They were more than willing to give him directions to the boy’s mother; a local mechanic owned by a Toydarian. Mother to a slave child, taken away by jetiise to a new and privileged life on Coruscant. It was like a fairy tale, except she still was living in their midst. Her name was Shmi. After so many years, he was inured to it. It was never her.

This time, it was her.

Once, long ago, he’d laid in the dark, stinking hold of a slave freighter, half dead of heartbreak and wound-spite. She’d been shackled across from him, and made him drink his water ration, sip by metallic sip. Jango had never known the names of most of the people - the guards would punish anyone found speaking - but he’d learned Shmi’s when someone had asked her to sing. Shmi’s voice had been untrained and smokey, the words in a language he didn’t recognise, but that he always remembered as sounding like green and growing things. Later, she’d sung, very quietly, just for him, a soothing wordless lullaby that had threaded through his dreams, cold and clear, like looking up at the stars on a midwinter’s night. Jango had woken, reeking of sour sweat to find his fever had broken, and that he was going to live.

He’d hated her for it, on the spice transport.

“You buy something, or get out,” snapped the Toydarian, wings flapping right in his visor. “No tourists.”

“Got a problem with my ship,” said Jango, watching Shmi rummage through the junk bins. “They say your girl can fix anything.”

“No,” said Watto, rearing back. “She stays. Deals with customers.”

“After hours,” Jango countered. In the end, Watto demanded a staggeringly large bond on top of an inflated fee, and ostentatiously ran Jango’s credit chips through his verification machine.

“Charge you for damages,” her owner muttered darkly. “Better return her in good condition.” The Toydarian was a fool to let her out of his sight. Her hair was still dark, without a trace of grey, and she moved without stiffness or injury. Unlucky for her; even traders without much experience in humans could tell how young she was.

Nevertheless, when she arrived, Shmi’s face was placid. If her hands were white-knuckled, it might only have been from the weight of her tool bags.

“What seems to be the problem, sir?” she asked, as he walked her through to the hold. She hadn’t looked up once.

Jango unsealed his helmet, and put it down. “The ship's fine. Shmi, do you remember me?”

She raised her eyes, just enough. “No, sir.”

“It would have been thirteen, maybe fourteen standard years ago. A freighter - in the cargo hold - I was sick -” He didn’t know the ship’s name.

“You - you had the fever - you lived!” Shmi said, the worn expression dropping momentarily from her face. She had thought about him, had worried.

“Ah, yes,” Jango said. ”I did. But that’s not important, right now. Sit down. Listen.”

It was an uncomfortable explanation. Gardulla’s rage at the realisation that somehow, a Force sensitive child had slipped through her fingers. The Hutt would probably file a lawsuit against Watto, accusing him of collusion and fraud in an attempt to regain at least some of what she'd lost. Shmi herself was still in her childbearing years; Jango knew at least one cartel that would pump her full of fertility drugs and keep her pregnant in the hope of another Force sensitive child, until she died of it.

“I’d be surprised if you weren’t kidnapped,” he told her, truthfully. “That Toydarian can’t keep you safe. You’re lucky I found you first.”

“But my transmitter…” Shmi whispered, clutching her shoulder. They would have told her it would bind her to her owner.

“Doesn’t matter. There are ways around it. Can you stay still?”

“I - yes.” All colour had been driven from her cheeks.

“I’m going to disable your transmitter. If you could slide your tunic off your shoulder. It might burn.” It was a procedure he’d done before, but always as part of a bounty. Strange to touch her, to prod the wiry muscle of her shoulder before holding the highly illegal device against her skin. It whirred, and grew warm until the lights blinked green. She didn’t flinch, stoic as a proper Mando.

“What - what do I do now?” Her hands were anxiously kneading together on her lap. 

“Whatever you want. I can take you anywhere. Plenty of people could use a mechanic with your skills. Or - I will have a son, soon, and - he’ll need things. It would be a job,” he added hurriedly. “For pay.” Jango had carried her kindness around with him for years, a reminder than there was more to the galaxy than the life he’d carved out for himself. If ensuring her safety meant that he lost the jetiise’ trail, then so be it. There were always more.

“My Ani’s gone,” said Shmi. “I need to think.” Her gaze was drawn inexorably to the device in his hand. “How do you use that thing?”

“It’s death if you’re caught.”

“There are things worse than death,” she reminded him.

* * *

He picked up his bond from a huffing Watto - the Toydarian seemed to enjoy playing against type - the following morning, in the relative cool before the sun drove everyone indoors.

“She does good work,” he said, pocketing what remained of his credits.

The Toydarian looked unimpressed. “Everyone’s sniffing around these days. She’s not for sale.” Jango revised his estimate. She would be disappeared in a week if he didn’t take her with him.

* * *

After curfew that night, Shmi scratched on the Whitesun’s door until someone cracked it open.

“Shmi,” Old Beru said, surprised. ‘Is there something wrong?”

“I’m leaving,” Shmi told her. “I’ll send word, if I can. Make sure the things in my house are shared.” It had been empty with Ani gone, Shmi just a bereft shadow in the walls. “This will disable the transmitters. It worked on mine. Don’t ask.” He’d just let her have it, in the end.

“Don’t look back,” said Old Beru, and Shmi went. In the years to come, a Mandalorian would occasionally deliver small fat bags of untraceable credits, and other useful things. For Mitta, he would tell them, because you endure. 

* * *

Smashing down walls was good, clean work. The longnecks had decided on a course of cerebrospinal taps, so the knowledge that they didn’t approve of his remodelling only added to Jango’s enjoyment. If Shmi wanted a garden, Shmi could have one. She was a fine mechanic - _Jaster’s Legacy_ had never handled better - but he never could get those songs of hers out of his head. Jango had seen her looking at the near-constant storms with a numb, bewildered expression. A transplant from a desert planet drowning in grief. A garden would give her something to do until she put roots down herself. Tipoca City was half-empty space in this district, and if those aiwha-bait really cared they could take it out of his fee. Jango eyed the roof with distaste. It’s time was coming. 

* * *

“Fett used to be Vhett, you know,” he said, and repressed a surprising urge to tell her about his family. “Means farmer in Mandalorian.”

“Farmer Jango,” Shmi said, slyly, potting the latest cuttings he’d smuggled in for her. “Would it really have suited you?”

“I’m just a simple man,” said Jango, just to make her laugh. Gleaming eyes briefly opened in the darkness under a bench, and closed again.

“Is that the strill?” he asked, distracted.

“Ye-es. We came to an agreement.”

“You and Vau?”

“No, me and Mird. It eats the vermin, and I leave the lamp just so.” She gestured, hands covered in soil. One of the heat lamps over the Tatooine plants was bent, directing its warmth towards Mird’s cubbyhole.

“Huh,” he said, leaning down cautiously. Mird usually stayed close to Vau, but there was a nest under the bench, blanket and all.

“Careful!” Boba, in one of those boneless manoeuvres that made Jango half-wonder if they’d spliced his son with sleen, had leaned out from the sling, and was trying to grab a handful of dirt to put in his mouth. Like everything else within reach of his ik'aad these days.

“Silly ad’ika, dirt’s not for eating,” he told his tiny son, tilting him upright and jiggling him in the sling. Boba shoved his hand in his mouth instead, watching his father’s face carefully. “Hands aren’t for eating, either.”

Shmi laughed.

* * *

Jango landed early, pleased with a job done well. He was less pleased when his helmet picked up an IR blob that resolved into a group of cadets - no. It was the Nulls, defiantly clustered around a still-warm corpse they’d wrapped in a blanket.

“He was being rude to Miss Shmi and he wouldn’t stop,” Ordo explained matter of factly, his child’s voice unwavering. He helped them drag the dead weight to the _Legacy_ ’s cargo hold, and shove it into one of the cold storage lockers.

“Explain,” he ordered, while they were still relatively clear of kaminiise surveillance.

“You weren’t here, and we had to make him stop,” Prudii said. Jango felt an unwelcome frisson of guilt for forgetting how his presence - or not - would affect Shmi. He’d known what Priest was when he’d chosen him for the Cuy’val Dar. “She had bruises and we saw them. Mird helped.” The strill was nowhere to be seen. It’d probably tucked itself away to sleep off the meal it had made of Dred Priest.

“Miss Shmi is lucky she has you to protect her,” he said to the group. Their backs straightened instantly. Har’chaak.

“We made a proper decision matrix and everything,” said Kom’rk. “Do you want to see it, sir?”

“I don’t need to see it to know it was the right thing to do,” Jango said. “Does Miss Shmi know about this?”

“No, sir,” they chorused.

“Well done. I can take it from here,” he said. He could probably even get a bounty for Priest. The man had done enough to earn one. “Don’t tell anyone. Not even your Kal’buir.”

“Yes, sir.” Quieter this time, eyes wide. Time would tell if they could keep the promise.

Boba saw him first when he slipped into their apartment.

“Daddy! Daddy!” his son shrieked, mouth full, waving a blunted fork around with one chubby arm. “Daddy!” Shmi turned to the door, face suddenly anxious.

“I’m sorry -” she stammered. “There’s no dinner - I can make - ”

“Don’t worry,” said Jango. “I’ve already eaten.”

“Daddy, up!” demanded Boba, like the tiny food-smeared dictator he was. “I want up!” Worse things than Boba’s dinner had had to have been washed off his armour. Obediently, he lifted his son high, and blew a raspberry on Boba's rounded belly, eliciting gurgles of delight and small sticky hands patting at his curls. Shmi's face was carefully blank as she cleared away the remains of their meal. It’d been years since she’d reverted to this level of caution, and he was suddenly, viciously pleased Priest was dead. Skirata’s pets had done the right thing. If Reau came sniffing around looking for her boyfriend, Jango would take care of her himself.

* * *

“You remembered! Thank you,” said Shmi, as Jango handed over the box of pollination drones. She had lost the pinched look of endurance that had characterised her on Tatooine. Jango had delivered enough packages to the Whitesun and Banai houses over the years to remind himself of what it looked like.

Her garden had expanded. She’d split it out into growing zones, depending on environmental needs, and even then tiers of multi-coloured foliage went from the floor to the translucent ceiling. Salvaged pipes and sensors and tiny controllers made sure everything she’d planted would flourish. Boba had his own tubs, on wheels so they could be dragged around depending what he decided he wanted to grow. At times they had been mudpits where he was digging for, or had buried treasure, but just now one sported a respectable crop of herbs from Concord Dawn. His son, a vhett after all.

Shm’ika, though - those herbs she grew year round, and when Jango crushed a leaf in his hands, it smelt draluram. Like home.

* * *

Kamino’s weather was so uniformly awful that when the storms stopped the humans tended to stop what they were doing and emerge from the buildings, faces upturned, blinking at the sun.

This was not one of those times. Still, Shmi and Boba were outside, drenched to the skin in the midsummer downpour. They were crouched down in the middle of the sheltered courtyard, barefoot, next to a mound of...something? Curiosity got the better of Jango. He shucked his overtunic and shoes and went to join them, fat drops spattering against his skin.

“We're going to make a river, and a lake, and a castle,” Boba informed him, flattening out the stuff - it looked like ballistic sand, from the mortar range backstops - and making a trough. Shmi had set a series of basins in a cascade, the lowest tilted to flow into Boba’s trench. “You can help if you want, buir.”

There were sacks of pebbles propped up against one of the walls, and Shmi opened one, putting handfuls in her basin to make the water flow faster. Jango followed his son’s instructions to make a deep well in the middle of the sand pile, feeling somewhat stupid. Between them, they made a not entirely traditional Mando fortification overlooking it, and used some of the bright pebbles as windows and decoration. He’d have to ask Shmi where she got them - Jango had never seen anything like them, but the kaminiise tried to keep the Cuy’val Dar segregated. Shmi, however, had a knack for flowing around obstacles like water - no, like sand.

When Boba got bored, he made some rather impressive krayt dragon calls, mixed with roars he insisted were from a mythosaur, and stomped his mountain and castle flat into the lake. By then his lips were verging on blue, and Jango bundled him through into the ‘fresher to warm up.

Shmi had tzai and cake ready for them by the time they emerged, but wouldn’t quite meet his gaze. It was only then he realised he was still in his nearly transparent undershirt, and dumped Boba on a chair to go dress himself. She’d been looking at him, he belatedly understood, sneaking sidelong glances at his shoulders and back while he played with his son in the rain. It'd been years since he'd let anyone see him like that. Years since anyone had looked. Decades, even.

“I can be a kraytosaur and a bounty hunter if I want to,” declared Boba, refusing to be constrained by adults and their lack of imagination.

“You’re still a little short for a mythosaur,” said Shmi. “Or a dragon.”

“I’m going to be taller than buir,” said Boba. It was true; his son had never been half-starved and desperate. At times he almost resented it; Boba was what Jango could have, should have been if he’d had the chance. He was careful to keep those feelings buried under snow. If he failed, Boba had Shmi, and she’d managed to hide a Force sensitive child from the Hutts. His son would be safe.

“Probably,” Jango said easily. “Need to get you your own armour, Bob'ika, you won’t fit mine.”

“Do mythosaurs even need armour?” Shmi wondered out loud, to Boba’s consternation. It appeared that they did.

“Where’d you get those little rocks from?” he asked Shmi later, after they'd put Boba to bed.

“Traded for them,” she answered, stitching in bright threads. Nearly all of her clothing had a red bird on it somewhere, he’d noticed, a far cry from the grey and dust colours of Tatooine. “From a blue-eyed woman in one of the food production biomes.”

“A kaminii, you mean.”

“I mean a slave mother,” said Shmi, putting her work down in her lap, and meeting his eyes squarely. “She wanted me to grow some things for her. Her child’s not doing as well as it could.”

Of course that’s what she’d meant. That’s what she did, find people and help them. Content, Jango dropped the subject, watched her sew a sigil into the shoulder of his son’s tunic under the evening light. A Tatooine sand symbol; his Alphas had started using some of the same iconography on their armour. Even the incessant sound of the rain beating against the windows seemed to cocoon them away from the rest of the galaxy, a small secure pause of jatne manda.

The new awareness he had of Shmi wasn’t unwelcome. Aurra Sing would have laughed at him for it, scorned his sentimentality, and Jango abruptly decided not to cut her in on his next job.

* * *

Skirata’s Nulls had been regular visitors since he had helped them dispose of Priest’s corpse, keeping a protective eye on Miss Shmi. Tucked away in the Mandalore section were a few plants that were the latest iteration of Mereel and A'den’s experiments in the most heturam spices ever, and the gurgling chuckle of rain chains to the water tank had were courtesy of Kom’rk and Jaing’s ability to scavenge. Reau had not been a problem. Isabet Reau had, in fact, gone missing. Her body was never found. Surveillance footage showed nothing. They’d gotten better; it was a kandosii job.

The garden was a truce. Despite Vau’s training, Mird never stalked people in it, usually content to curl up on its increasing ragged blanket - now only the topmost of its cushioned nest - or to demand scratches from Shmi or Boba when it eeled its way through the plants to inspect what they were doing. Once she’d started growing something that had turned out to be mislabeled strill-nip, and after some searching they’d found Mird, upturned and comatose in the middle of the half-grown plants, blowing bubbles with its drool.

* * *

Shmi was in her greenhouse, of course. Jango leaned in the doorway and watched her, half-singing, half-humming. Something happy under her breath, while her deft fingers separated the latest batch of seedlings for re-planting. She turned to him, and smiled, that half-shy, half pleased smile she reserved for him, small secrets hidden in the curve of her mouth.

“I used a kaminiise dart, Shm’ika,” he told her. “The jetiise will come here, sooner or later.”

“Oh,” said Shmi, and dropped everything, fingers pushed into the soil to hold herself up. “Oh, my Anakin. Jan’ika.”

“You’re disgusting,” Boba told his parents, and stalked out, leaving them to it.

* * *

Notes:

This story owes much to [fialleril's](http://fialleril.tumblr.com/tagged/tatooine+slave+culture) work on Tatooine slave culture. Specifically: the farewell Old Beru gives Shmi, that the packages Jango hands over are for Mitta, who endured, the tzai she makes to warm up up Boba and Jango (although she doesn’t give them the recipe until much, much later), the Mother’s Protection sigil that Shmi is embroidering on Boba’s shirt and the red birds of Ekkreth on her own (and others that she's introduced to the Alphas and lower-caste Kaminoans), and the symbolism of why Shmi’s songs sound ‘green’ to Jango (and why he associates her with gardens). She’s singing freedom songs in Amatakka. Interestingly, I had already written her as a singer before I found fialleril’s headcanon, so of course I had to give her the same voice. All mistakes are my own.

Glossary:

These definitions are mostly taken from the [Mando'a Database](https://mandoa.org/), with much gratitude to the maintainers. 

  * ad'ika: little one, son, daughter, of any age
  * aiwha: a non-sentient species of winged cetaceans native to the planet Kamino
  * buir: father or mother, parent
  * cin vhetin: fresh start, clean slate - lit. white field, virgin snow
  * cuy’val dar: one hundred individuals summoned by Mandalorian bounty hunter Jango Fett, to come to the watery world of Kamino to train clone troopers for the Galactic Republic lit. those who no longer exist
  * draluram: vivid - used only of food, to indicate strong, distinct flavour, lit. *bright mouth* 
  * haar'chak: mild expletive, similar to damn it! or shit!
  * heturam: *mouthburn* - a sought-after state of intense burning in the mouth brought about by very spicy food
  * ika diminutive suffix written as 'ika - also added to a name as a very familiar or childhood form, e.g, Ord'ika - Little Ordo
  * ik'aad: baby, child under 3
  * jatne manda: good mood - a complex sense of being at one with your clan and life
  * jetii(se): Jedi, slightly derogatory
  * kaminii(se): Kaminoan, slightly derogatory
  * kandosii: indomitable, ruthless 
  * tzai: tea brewed from roots and spices native to Tatooine
  * vhett: farmer




End file.
